No Home Runs in Energy Bill
Little Impact Expected for Imported Oil, Pollution, Power Grid

By Dan Morgan and Peter Behr
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, November 16, 2003; Page A10

The energy bill before Congress is a bulky tome of more than 1,000 pages, with thousands of provisions affecting every corner of the country.

But for all its size, industry officials and environmental activists of widely divergent viewpoints generally agree that it will have only a modest impact on the nation's most pressing energy problems, including its reliance on foreign energy supplies, an overburdened electricity grid and fuels that pollute the air and may alter the atmosphere.

For those who want to deal aggressively with the dangers of climate change and air polluted by auto exhausts, power plants and factories, the bill is a disappointment.

But for those who believe the United States needs to dramatically increase its domestic energy production in the interest of national security, the legislation also falls short.

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So…if this enery bill isn't helping find new energy resources, curbing pollution of moving us toward independance from foreign energy sources, what does it do?

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The bill does provide federal financial support for a proposed $20 billion trans-Alaska gas pipeline -- a major potential source of new natural gas supplies. But the incentives are not enough to get the project going, say officials of ConocoPhillips, a primary backer. Even under the best of circumstances, the gas would not arrive for a decade.

Negotiators provided a wide range of tax incentives to promote wind power generators, energy-efficient homes and hybrid passenger cars running on gasoline and batteries, and Republicans say these and other conservation measures will produce or save enough electricity between now and 2020 to make it unnecessary to build 130 new 300-megawatt power plants.

Money would be authorized for powering government buildings with state-of-the-art photovoltaic cells, and the bill even sets aside $6.2 million to promote bicycles as a way to conserve energy. Incentives for developing new, energy-efficient traffic lights could save significant amounts of electricity.

But impressive as the conservation savings are, they amount to only about three months of U.S. energy consumption between now and 2020, according to a preliminary estimate by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy.